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wax

Pronunciation: /waks/

The English word “wax” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. Any oily, water-resistant, solid or semisolid substance; normally long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols or esters.
  2. Beeswax (a wax secreted by bees).
  3. Earwax (a wax secreted by the ears).
  4. Any preparation containing wax, used as a polish.
  5. The phonograph record format for music.
  6. A thick syrup made by boiling down the sap of the sugar maple and then cooling it.
  7. Any of a class of drugs with weed oil and butane as main ingredients; hash oil.
  8. The process of growing.

adjective

  1. Made of wax.

verb

  1. To coat with wax or a similar material.
  2. To form a wax (a thick maple syrup).
  3. To apply wax to (something, such as a shoe, a floor, a car, or an apple), usually to make it shiny.
  4. To remove hair at the roots from (a part of the body) by coating the skin with a film of wax that is then pulled away sharply.
  5. To defeat utterly.
  6. To kill, especially to murder a person.
  7. To record.
  8. To greaten.
  9. To increasingly assume the specified characteristic.
  10. To appear larger each night as a progression from a new moon to a full moon.
  11. To move from low tide to high tide.

Etymology

From Middle English wax, from Old English weax, from Proto-Germanic *wahsą, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *woḱ-so-. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Woaks (“wax”), West Frisian waaks (“wax”), Dutch was (“wax”), German Wachs (“wax”), German Low German Wass (“wax”), Luxembourgish Wuess (“wax”), Vilamovian wāhs (“wax”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk voks (“wax”), Faroese vaks…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.